July 06, 2004

An internet pilgrim's guide to accentual-syllabic verse

Yesterday I cited
evidence that some English professors may be a little shaky about verse scansion.
In the comments, Charles
Hartman raised a valid point about the (in)appropriateness of the classical
taxonomy of foot types as a basis for metrical description, and also asked what sort
of linguistic analysis might be genuinely useful in analyzing poetic rhythm.

I'm going to try to answer Charles' questions in three stages.

First, in this
post, I'll lay out a way of thinking about accentual-syllabic verse. This point
of view is by no means original to me, but I'll present it without references
and in a somewhat idiosyncratic form, for ease of assimilation. Second, in a
later post, I'll take up the question of "feet" and the classical
bestiary from amphibrach to trochee, and discuss Charles
Hartman's implication that this framework can be confusing and even misleading if taken too seriously as a foundation
for metrical analysis. In a third post, I'll offer a few suggestions about the
basic aspects of language sound structure that (I think) anyone who cares about
poetic meter -- and rhythmic patterns in poetry more generally -- should understand
and know how to apply descriptively.

I hope that all this will be helpful for readers who are uncertain about how
metered verse in English works. I recognize that there are other readers who
know much more than I do about some or all aspects of these phenomena. I hope
that they'll find a few interesting things here, if only by association or in
reaction, and I expect to learn from their comments and objections.

The rest of this post is a mildly-edited version of the metered-verse section
of my notes for lecture #16, "Linguistic Form in Art, Ritual and Play",
from Linguistics 001, the introductory linguistics course at Penn.

Tune-text alignment in English

Consider the first verse of the simple song Skip to my Lou, as presented
in Ruth Crawford Seeger's American Folk Songs for Children (Doubleday,
1948).

In this verse, as throughout the song, a single line is repeated three
times, against a simple melody that sketches a major triad in the tonic,
the dominant, and then again the tonic.The verse ends with the invariant
line "skip-a to my lou, my darling."

The songbook gives a couple of dozen other verses. Each has the same
structure -- a single line repeated three times, and the invariant ending
"skip-a to my lou, my darling." Thus the problem of fitting words to music
can be reduced for each verse to the problem of
fitting a single line to the first two bars of the melody -- everything
else is just repetition.

This is about as simple as songs get. Nevertheless, a four- or five-year-old
learning new verses has to solve a non-trivial problem.

One way to look at the problem is to line a few verses up against a depiction
of the metrical structure of the first two bars of the song. These two
bars contain four "quarter notes". The metronome marking at the top of
the music says that the quarter note equals 132, i.e. 132 quarter
notes per minute, or a little more than two quarter notes per second.

Standard western musical structure assumes a regular hierarchical subdivision
of time. In this case, each quarter note can be divided into two
eighth notes, each eighth note into two sixteenth notes, etc. At each
level, the first of the subdividing notes is "stronger" than the other
-- it is the "downbeat."

Three levels are enough for this musical example. As for the alignment
with the melody, the song provides a separate pitch for each quarter note.
If that note is subdivided by the syllables of the verse, then the subdividing
syllables just repeat the same note.

Here is the first verse -- this is just a schematic presentation of exactly
the information provided by the musical notation above:

Here are some other verses, aligned under another copy of the same melodic
and metrical schema:

E
C
E
G
(pitches) X
X
X
X (1/4
notes) X X
X X
X X
X X (1/8
notes) X X X
X X X X X
X X X X X
X X X (1/16
notes)pig in the par- lour
what'll I docat in the but-ter milk lapping
up creamrab-bit in the corn field big
as a mulehogs in the po-ta- to patch rooting up
corndad's old hat
and ma- ma's old shoe
There are many other verses -- Seeger provides a couple of dozen in the
publication cited, and says "this song has hundreds of stanzas and is
always picking up new ones. One collector alone gives 150, from which
the above 22 were selected as encouragement to further improvisation."

The samples given above are enough to give us a guess about the
principles involved. For a start, we can say something about what the
principles are NOT:

There is not a fixed number of syllables in a line -- the samples
have between 8 and 11 syllables.

Even for a given number of syllables, the alignment with the melody
and rhythm of the song is not fixed by syllable order, but depends on
the stress and structure of the words.

For instance, both "little red wagon painted blue" and "dad's old
hat and mama's old shoe" have eight syllables, but if we used the syllable-by-syllable
alignment of the first line for the second line, we'd get the impossible pattern:

which gives the impression of stressing the line as "DAD's-old-hat
AND maMA's old SHOE" (where the capitalized syllables correspond to
the quarter-note beat of the song, and also to the points of pitch change).

No self-respecting American nursery school graduate would ever think
to sing the line that way -- except perhaps as a joke.

[as a party trick, Haj Ross used to sing "Take me out to the ball game" with the words shifted by half a beat relative to the music. It's hard to learn to do, and curiously hilarious to hear.]

The principles of tune-text alignment for this song seem to be:

Each of the four quarter notes is always aligned with a stressed
syllable

There is always at least one syllable in between each pair of quarter
notes, so that the intervening eighth-note positions are always filled,
but these intervening syllables are not always stressed

Syllables aligned with sixteenth notes may be added to taste.

This implies that the minimum plausible line of "skip to my lou" might be
seven rather than eight syllables. For instance, "Jane's old hat and Jim's
old shoe" might be OK.

We can make some other observations, such as this one:

The eighth sixteenth-note position seems to be avoided (the "upbeat"
to the second measure); this corresponds to a tendency to break the
line into two parts at this point

The tenth sixteenth-note position is often filled, perhaps to emphasize the continuity of the second measure.

You can verify for yourself that the rest of Ruth Crawford Seeger's cited
lines follow the same pattern:

Pull her up and down in the little red wagonRats in the bread tray, how they chewChickens in the garden, shoo shoo shooCow in the kitchen, moo cow mooGoing to market two by twoBack from market, what did you do?Had a glass of buttermilk, one and twoSkip skip skip-a to my louSkip a little faster, that won't doGoing to Texas, come along tooLost my partner, what'll I doI'll get another one prettier than youCatch that red bird, skip to my louIf you can't get a red bird, take a blueIf you can't get a blue bird, black bird'll do

The only real novelty in these additional examples is in the line ending
with wagon, where there is an extra syllable aligned after
the fourth quarter-note.

We can rephrase our observations by saying that Skip to my lou
has a four-beat line, where the beats correspond to the quarter notes
of the first two bars of the song, and where one to four additional syllables
occur between each adjacent pair of beats.

I have seen four- and five-year-old children making up new verses to
this song. No one has to teach them the rules -- they figure them out
easily enough by themselves.

Most songs are more complicated than this one, but the basic principles
of tune-text alignment in English remain the same: syllables are aligned
with notes so that the stress pattern of the text and the rhythmic structure
of the tune are congruent. If you have some familarity with designing
computer algorithms, you might see if you can design one that will correctly
specify the tune-text alignment for a simple song like this one.

To make up new verses -- or to sing old ones correctly -- you have to
understand, implicitly, the metrical hierarchy of the music, the stress
pattern of the text, and the way that they can be aligned. This understanding
comes effortlessly to young children, providing more evidence of
the psychological reality (and naturalness) of the linguistic (and musical)
concepts involved.

Why should there be something natural about the process of aligning two
structures so as to make them rhythmically congruent? One plausible hypothesis
is that this is the basis of coordination among speech articulators in
ordinary talking. On this view, singing is just a kind of regularized
and stylized form of speaking. In both cases, rhythmic structures are
serving a coordinative function.

Accentual/syllabic verse in English

The principles of tune-text association for Skip to my Lou are basically
the same as the principles that underlie most metered verse in English.

Let's take a look at how McGrew works. The poem has 58
lines, of which the first six are given below.

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute
saloon;The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a
rag-time tune;Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan
McGrew,And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the
lady that's known as Lou.When out of the night, which was fifty below, and
into the din and the glare,There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty,
and loaded for bear.

If you read these lines out loud, you can hardly avoid getting an impression
of the intended rhythm. It's a seven-beat line, with either one or two additional
syllables between each pair of adjacent beats. The beginning of the line
can start with zero, one or two "upbeat" syllables. There is always a phrasal
break between the fourth and fifth beats of each line, and occasionally
there is no intervening syllable at this point (as if it were a line break).

We can annotate the rhythmic structure of the next six lines of the poem
by using a sharp sign (#) for each "beat", a period for additional
syllables, and a slash (/) for the phrase break:

This kind of annotation of the rhythmic structure of a verse is called scansion,
and the basic rhythmic pattern of a poem (if it has one) is called its meter.
The scansion shows us how the underlying pattern (here a seven-beat
line with one or two intervening syllables) is realized in each line of
the poem.

There is quite a bit to say about meter and scansion, even of metrically
simple poems (some might even say doggerel) like McGrew. The point
that we want to draw out here is that the basic principles are the same
as those that applied in the case of Skip to my lou-- a
certain number of beats per line, with variable (but constrained) numbers
of syllables between the beats, and a regular break in a certain position.

Theorists distinguish among various kinds of poetic meter. The word meter
means measure, and in each case, something is being measured
or counted. In syllabic meters (as in French poetry), the only thing that
matters is the number of syllables per line. In some languages (Classical
Greek,
Latin, Arabic,
Hausa),
the pattern of "long" and "short" syllables is regulated.
In accentual meters, what is counted is accents -- or more properly beat-aligned
accents. Most English metered verse is accentual-syllabic -- each
line has a given number of "beats", but there are also more or less strong
restrictions of the number of intervening syllables.

It is important to remember that poetic meter is an abtract pattern, a kind
of grid against which the poet arranges his or her lines according to some general
principles of congruence. How the congruence is defined depends on the poetic
style, but also very much on the sound structure of the language that the poetry
is written in. For metered verse to be a living form -- as it has been in many
cultures around the world, both ancient and modern -- its patterns have to be
defined in terms of phonological categories whose patterns poets and their audience
can hear and feel.

Metrical feet

In the notation we've been using, The shooting of Dan McGrew is written
in a fairly even mixture of . # and . . # rhythmic elements (225
. # and 198 . . # to be precise). The distinction doesn't really
seem to matter to its form, which we described simply as seven beats with one
or two intervening syllables, divided into two half-lines of four beats and
three beats. The lyrics to the 1986 hit Walk
this way (by Run-DMC and Aerosmith) have the same basic pattern: seven
beats, divided as four plus three. However, now there can be as many as three
weak syllables between each pair of strong syllables (where "strong"
means "aligned with the beat"):

Thus Walk this way has exactly the same meter and rhyme scheme
as The shooting of Dan McGrew, except for a slight relaxation of
the meter: instead of one or two weak syllables between beats, Aerosmith's
song has one, two or three.

Lewis Carroll's mock epic The
Hunting of the Snark also has the same basic meter as The
shooting of Dan McGrew: Here are the first two stanzas:

. . # . .
# . # .
#
"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
. . # . . #
. #
As he landed his crew with care;
. # . . # .
. # . . #
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
. . # . . # .
. #
By a finger entwined in his hair.
. . # . .
# . . # .
#
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
. . # . . #
. . #
That alone should encourage the crew.
. . # . .
# . . # .
#
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
. . # . .
# . #
What I tell you three times is true."

Snark has alternate lines of four and three beats -- corresponding
to the four/three division of the seven-beat line in McGrew.
With the promotion of the half lines to full lines, additional rhymes
are added (here cried/tide and twice/thrice)
to reinforce the stanzaic form, but the meter is basically identical.

There are 1754 . . # sequences, to only 251 . # sequences,
for a ratio of about seven to one, while the . # sequences that
do occur are essentially all at the beginning or the end of a line. Thus
Snark is moving in the direction of fixing not only the number of "beats"
-- of strong syllables in the line -- but also the number and placement
of weak syllables.

In order to characterize poetic forms in which the arrangement of strong
and weak positions is regulated in this way, poets and critics have borrowed
the terminology of Greek (and Latin) metrics. The Greek metrical system
was based on patterns of totally different units -- their meters did not
care about the location of accented syllables, but rather regulated the
pattern of long and short syllables. They then established a congruence
between long and short syllables and patterns of long and short time-units
in the musical meters of the period. Metrical systems that depend on syllable-length
in this way are called quantitative. By contrast, English lyric
poets rely on a congruence between stress patterns and the beat structure
of our music, resulting in a metrical system that is called accentual
or accentual-syllabic.

These different choices of basic poetic stuff are not arbitrary. The
(classical) Greek language made a systematic distinction between long
and short vowels, whereas English does not; English word-stress organizes
the rhythm of English speech in a way that Greek accent did not.

Nevertheless, all poetic forms are based on analogies among different
sorts of patterns, and it is easy enough to make an analogy between the
Greeks' patterns of long and short syllables, and our patterns of strong
and weak syllables. Thus we can borrow the Greek term iamb
-- applied to the Greek pattern "short long" -- and apply it
to the English pattern "weak strong." The Greeks called these
basic patterns "feet" (actually of course they called them the
equivalent in Greek). Here are some of the commoner foot names, represented
with the typographically convenient (but non-standard!) notation of "."
for short positions and "#" for long ones:

iamb

. #

anapest

. . #

trochee

# .

dactyl

# . .

spondee

# #

In discussing classical (Greek and Latin) metrics, it's more common to
see the macron used for long positions and the breve for
short ones, with a vertically-stacked combination of the two symbols used
for "common" positions that might be either long or short, thus:

For English accentual/syllabic verse, we are dealing with patterns of stressed
and unstressed (rather than long and short syllables), and the usual notation
is something like acute accents over stressed syllables with breves over unstressed
ones, as exemplified in this
page. Other explanations of English verse scansion use more convenient typography,
such the symbols / and u as substitutes for the acute accent and breve respectively.
As you've seen, we've used '#' and '.' -- changing the notation doesn't change
the ideas, or shouldn't do so, anyhow.

Using whatever notation, themeters we've been examining (The Hunting
of the Snark, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, Walk This Way) combine
iambic and anapestic rhythms, with alternating lines of four and three feet.
This ballad
stanza is a common form in English folk poetry.

The Greeks (and their Roman students) identified types of poetic lines
in terms of the type of rhythmic pattern (foot) used, and the number of
repetitions of the pattern. Thus a pattern consisting of five iambs would
be an iambic pentameter; a pattern consisting of six dactyls would be
a dactylic hexameter; and so on.

In this way of talking, the ballad stanza alternates tetrameters (four-foot
lines) with trimeters (three-foot lines). A limerick is
typically two lines of anapestic trimeter, followed by two lines of anapestic
dimeter, followed by a final anapestic trimeter:

Iambic pentameter

When we look at the scansion of Skip to my lou or The shooting
of Dan McGrew, we see that there is a very good correlation between
strong positions in the meter ("beats") and main-stressed syllables of content
words.

This correlation is not perfect. There are a few cases where stressed
syllables of content words are in weak positions. Here is a line with
four examples (in bold face):

The rhythm of this line remains clear, however, since in each case there
are adjacent stressed words that are naturally more prominent, and so a
completely ordinary reading of the line still gives a direct expression
of the "swing" of the meter.

What never happens -- in such verse -- is for the main-stressed syllable
of a polysyllabic word to be scanned in a weak position.

There are also examples of a "beat" position occupied by a word -- such
as a function word -- whose natural degree of prominence is weak. However,
in nearly all of these cases, there are even weaker words adjacent, so
that the natural rhythm of the phrase still expresses the meter clearly:

. # . #
. . # . #That one of you is a hound of hell . . .

As a result, it is impossible to read the poem without intuitively grasping
its meter -- whether you want to or not!

In most metered verse in English, the meter is not as obvious. Nevertheless,
the basic rules of meter and scansion remain the same: there are a certain
number of strong ("beat") syllables per line, with a specified number
of intervening syllables permitted between the beats. The main-stressed
syllable of a polysyllabic word is never allowed to occur in one of the
intervening weak (non-beat) positions in the meter. Naturally strong monosyllables
may occur in metrically weak positions.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Service's handling of meter and
that of subtler English poets is the treatment of metrically strong positions.
In poems where the meter is obvious or even insistent, like limericks
or The shooting of Dan McGrew or The hunting of the
Snark, metrically strong positions are usually occupied by strongly
stressed syllables, with weaker syllables around them. In subtler metrical
styles, this correlation is relaxed, so that weak monosyllables often
appear in strong positions in the meter.

The result is a flexible sort of meter, able to vary between clear and
obvious rhythmicity and more prose-like patterns.

Like much English-language art poetry from Shakespeare to Auden, Alexander Pope's
An
Essay on Criticism is written in iambic pentameter, that
is, in lines of five repetitions of the iambic rhythm /.
#/

Sometimes his lines express the meter as directly as any limerick:

. # .
# . # .
# . #In search of wit these lose their common sense

Each strong position in the previous line is occupied by the stressed syllable
of a content word; each weak position is occupied by a prosodically-weak
function word, or by the unstressed syllable of a polysyllabic word. In
the line given below, both stressed syllables of imagination are used in
metrically strong positions, but otherwise the situation is the same:

. #
. # . # . # . #Where beams of warm imagination play

However, it is easy to find lines in the same poem where unstressed and
prosodically weak syllables are put in metrically strong positions, like
is and the in the couplet below:

As a result of this (and other aspects of poetic practice, such
as frequent inversion of the first foot of a line), there may be a complex
relationship between the abstract metrical pattern of iambic pentameter
and its linguistic rhythms. This somewhat indirect relationship between
the metrical pattern and its linguistic relationship is typical, although
the details differ from meter to meter and even from poet to poet.

Both the ballad meter and the iambic pentameter (in English) can be seen as
involving sequences of alternating weak and strong positions:

. . . w s . . .

The ballad stanza involves 4 + 3 + 4 + 3 of these /w s/ units,
while couplets of iambic pentameter (as in Pope's poem) involve 5 + 5.
The two different forms also typically exhibit different principles about
the instantiation of these weak and strong metrical positions.

In the English ballad meter, the basic idea seems to be that "strong"
positions in the meter should coincide with single syllables that are
"peaks" of linguistic stress, in the sense that they are naturally
more prominent than the syllables around them. The weak positions in this
meter are relatively unconstrained, and in particular may correspond to
different numbers of syllables with different stress properties, depending
on the poet (or the poem). The result is verse in which the natural rhythm
of linguistic performance strongly evokes the metrical form.

In English iambic pentameter, on the other hand, the basic constraints seem
to be that both strong and weak positions in the meter should correspond to
single syllables, and that "weak" positions in the meter should not
coincide with stress peaks (that is, syllables that are naturally more prominent
than those around them). The "strong" positions are relatively unconstrained.
The result is verse in which the natural rhythm of linguistic performance, while
metrically constrained, need not evoke the regular alternation of the metrical
form very strongly.

[There is a great deal more to be said about all this: what counts as a syllable;
where word boundaries are permitted, required or forbidden; the special treatment
of positions at the edges of metrical units, and the reasons for this; and so
on.]

As the comparison between ballad meter and iambic pentameter illustrates, different
poetic styles may constrain the relationship between metrical patterns and the
rhythms of language in quite different ways, even within the same language.
However, the relationship is usually not a matter of completely arbitrary conventions
-- say, "you can add extra syllables if they contain the letter 'x'". Rather,
like children's language games and the relation of lyrics to music in songs,
it is rooted in the sound structure of the language. Metrics is
applied phonology.

[Note: if you have comments, please feel free to send them to me by
email.]